This week was just as busy as the last weeks in the crypto sphere and we wanted to do a round-up for some of the noteworthy releases, changes and updates that happened recently.

Coinbase starting a market surveillance program

There seems to be a growing trend with US based exchanges moving further with security measures. After Gemini partnered up with NASDAQ and its SMARTS Market Surveillance, now Coinbase has hired a new professional, former New York Stock Exchange executive, in the field to be able to monitor market activity. The trend is probably a direct result of the strict changes in the US crypto regulatory landscape.

“This is similar to the projects I worked on at NYSE,” Elkins said to Businessinsider. “We are going to be deploying human insights and technology to weed out bad actors.”

While one of the focuses is to try and stop malicious actors from using Coinbase’s services, the system will also be used to monitor active trading and stop spoofing and market manipulation. This seems most crucial time for Coinbase to start this program, as just recently the company acquired Paradex and will build a second exchange to accompany Coinbase Pro.

EOS RAM prices crashed, but are still too high for adoption

RAM is a scarce recourse in the EOS ecosystem. RAM is the unit that you need to own when you are a dApp developer and you want to ‘hire’ the network to solve computations for you or to let users utilize your dApp. Block Producers can put RAM into the system, but only with upgrading their infrastructure and there is currently no real incentive for them to do so.

The problem started when speculators started hoarding RAM as they have realized that this scarce recourse will be needed in the future if the chain gains adoption. Prices of the network asset soared from 0.017 EOS/kb to a high of 0.88 EOS/kb before crashing down to 0.44 EOS / kb, where it is now. This means that currently for every kb the dApp will store, the developer needs to buy 1 RAM for 0.44 EOS, which is around 4 USD right now.

This means that after every user that will use the dApp the developer needs to pay around 10-20 USD, which is crazy especially since apps like CryptoKitties had a peak active user count of around 14500 back in December.

There are solutions being considered for the problem right now, but currently as it stands you can not really make use of EOS’s infrastructure for dApps.

NEO decentralization begins

NEO just posted via an official blog post that the era of decentralization begins for the network. The foundation initiated an election of new consensus nodes, which will bring decentralization to the network, which has currently 7 official validating nodes doing all the work.

Currently there is only one final candidate for an additional consensus node, this is the group named City of Zion, which is a pack of independent developers who have been working on the NEO chain for some time now.

The next candidate on the list is KPN, one of the largest telecom companies from the Netherlands.

Indian exchange Zebpay disables deposits and withdrawals under the pressure of the central bank

There were very mixed signals coming from India in the past few months. Our first article regarding the topic featured some sources stating that India has effectively banned cryptocurrencies and related businesses, but later on India based exchange PocketBit came out with a statement that there is no official ban, but banks will not be able to serve cryptocurrency related businesses.

India citizens later probably rejoiced as new came out that India will tax cryptocurrencies and will be more open to progress regarding these new assets.

Now it seems that Zebpay, India’s larget cryptocurrency exchange, has effectively disabled all deposits and withdrawals of Indian rupees (INR) for customers as the ban restricting financial institutions from serving crypto related businesses took place.

There has been a warning in place from Zebpay previously stating that this could become possibility, but still many users have expressed their negative feelings on their official twitter towards regulators as this leaves Indians without an official fiat supporting crypto exchange now.

In times like these it is important to research decentralized exchanges that connect buyers and seller, because frozen bank accounts could easily become a possibility later on.